As the National Catholic Register’s reporter Wayne Laugesen points out, the federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.

Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government’s discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools…”

Someone not so sanguine as me might have a different take on all this, of course. THAT person might be tempted to question the media. THAT person might doubt the integrity of people who love to remind us that they exist to ask the ‘tough’ questions, and that they have no agenda, and just go “where the story leads them”.

THAT person might ask why, when the evidence should lead them to realizing that there seems to be a lot of, umm, “extra-curricular activity” going on between teachers and the children entrusted to their care, we get …nothing.

This is a two-sided story. The first side is about the actual (not the fake college "rape" hoaxes) sexual abuse of students by a largely female teaching staff in our nation's public schools. The second side is about the media, many of whom are married to school teachers, who avert their gaze from sexual abuse that strikes too close to home.